“Death by 1,000 Pilots”
Most companies find that the biggest challenge to AI is taking a promising experiment, demo, or proof of concept and bringing it to market. McKinsey digital analyst Rodney Zemmel sums…
Context Serialization
In a recent edition of The Sequence Engineering newsletter, “Why Did MCP Win?,” the authors point to context serialization and exchange as a reason—perhaps the most important reason—why everyone’s talking…
Vibe Coding, Vibe Checking, and Vibe Blogging
For the past decade and a half, I’ve been exploring the intersection of technology, education, and design as a professor of cognitive science and design at UC San Diego. Some…
A Field Guide to Rapidly Improving AI Products
Most AI teams focus on the wrong things. Here’s a common scene from my consulting work: AI TEAMHere’s our agent architecture—we’ve got RAG here, a router there, and we’re using…
Seniors and Juniors
It almost sounds pejorative, doesn’t it? But the distinction between senior and junior software developers is built into our jobs and job titles. Whether we call it entry-level or something…
Copyright-Aware AI: Let’s Make It So
On April 22, 2022, I received an out-of-the-blue text from Sam Altman inquiring about the possibility of training GPT-4 on O’Reilly books. We had a call a few days later…
AI and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Wolf’s blog post “The Einstein AI Model” is a must-read. He contrasts his thinking about what we need from AI with another must-read, Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace.”1…
Congratulations, You Are Now an AI Company
If your company is building any kind of AI product or tool, congratulations! You are now an AI company. Yes, you’re still a retail company. Or a bank. Or a…
Think Different
There’s something that bothers me about the chatter that AI is making “intelligence” ubiquitous. For example, in a recent Bloomberg article, “AI Will Upend a Basic Assumption About How Companies…
AI’s Future: Not Always Bigger
On May 8, O’Reilly Media will be hosting Coding with AI: The End of Software Development as We Know It—a live virtual tech conference spotlighting how AI is already supercharging developers,…